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Opera on 3

Music: Classical: Opera

Programme presenting rare and fascinating operatic performances

Programme presenting rare and fascinating performances and vividly communicating the immediacy of the live experience

Opera on 3: Handel's Saul

Performances & Events

Music: Classical

10/10/2015

Handel's Saul

BBC Radio 3 - Opera on 3, Handel's Saul

Ivor Bolton conducts Handel's Saul at the 2015 Glyndebourne Festival.

A performance from the 2015 Glyndebourne Festival conducted by Ivor Bolton, with Christopher Purves as Saul, Iestyn Davies as David, Lucy Crowe as Merab and Sophie Bevan as Michal.

Handel's Saul, recorded at this year's Glyndebourne Festival, conducted by Ivor Bolton.

Presented by Andrew McGregor.

Cast:
Saul ..... Christopher Purves (baritone)
David ..... Iestyn Davies (countertenor)
Merab ..... Lucy Crowe (soprano)
Michal ..... Sophie Bevan (soprano)
Jonathan ..... Paul Appleby (tenor)
Abner/High Priest/Amalekite/Doeg ..... Benjamin Hulett (tenor)
The Witch of Endor ..... John Graham-Hall (tenor)

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Ivor Bolton (conductor)

When young David is hailed as a hero after defeating the Philistine champion Goliath, he arouses the envy of King Saul. Finding himself at the heart of the Royal Family as it's torn apart by Saul's increasingly obsessive jealousy, David is drawn into a complicated love story of his own with members of the royal family. In Georgian London in 1738, Handel and his librettist Charles Jennens used the story as the subject of one of the first English oratorios; now Australian director Barrie Kosky, making his Glyndebourne debut, has turned Handel's Saul into an opera as a series of vivid tableaux, a combination of dreamscape and Baroque nightmare in which a Lear-like King loses his grip on his sanity, and his family and nation crumbles around him.

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